London Fields by Martin Amis Read Free Book Online Page A

thing.'
    'I want my sandwich.'
    She moved on. Guy lingered, clutching his hands, and saying, 'But then it's hopeless. Don't you think? It's . . . quite hopeless.'
    And he whispered the same words at night in the hotel, and went on whispering them, even after their return to London, lying in sleep's caboose, seconds before Marmaduke woke him with a clout. 'But then it's hopeless . . . Utterly hopeless.'
    In excellent fettle, in the pink or the blue of boyish good health during their absence, Marmaduke sickened dramatically within a few hours of their return. Evenhandedly he dabbled with every virus, every hatching, afforded by that early spring. Recovering from mumps, he reacted catastrophically to his final whooping-cough shot. Superflu followed superflu in efficient relay. Doctors now visited him, unasked and unpaid, out of sheer professional curiosity. At this point, and for no clear reason (Sir Oliver asked if he might write a paper about it), Marmaduke's health radically improved. Indeed, he seemed to shed his sickly self as if it were a dead skin or a useless appendage: from the feverish grub of the old Marmaduke sprang a musclebound wunderkind, clear-eyed, pink-tongued, and (it transpired) infallibly vicious. The change was all very sudden. Guy and Hope went out one day, leaving the usual gastroenteritic nightmare slobbering on the kitchen floor; they returned after lunch to find Marmaduke strolling round the drawing-room with his hands in his pockets, watched by several speechless nannies. He had never crawled. Instead, he appeared to have worked it out that he could cause much more trouble, and have much more fun, in a state of peak fitness. His first move was to dispense with that midnight nap. The Clinches hired more help, or they tried. An ailing baby was one thing; a strappingly malevolent toddler was quite another. Up until now, Guy and Hope's relationship, to the child and to each other, had been largely paramedical. After Marmaduke's renaissance, it became, well – you wouldn't say paramilitary. You'd say military. The only people they could get who stayed longer than an hour or two were male nurses sacked from lunatic asylums, Around the house, these days there was a kind of SWAT team of burly orderlies, as well as a few scarred nannies and au pairs. Dazedly yet without bitterness, Guy calculated that Marmaduke, now in his ninth month, had already cost him a quarter of a million pounds. They went away again.
    This time they flew first-class to Madrid, stayed at the Ritz for three nights, and then hired a car and headed south. The car seemed powerful and luxurious enough; it was, without question, resoundingly expensive. (Hope whaled on the insurance. Guy studied the gold-rimmed document: they would airlift you out on almost any pretext.) But as they cruised, as they cruised and glistened one evening through the thin forests near the southernmost shore of the peninsula, a great upheaval or trauma seemed almost to dismantle the engine at a stroke – the manifold, the big end? In any event the car was clearly history. Around midnight Guy could push it no longer. They saw some lights: not many, and not bright.
    The Clinches found accommodation in a rude venta. What with the bare coil of the bulb, the lavatorial damp, the flummoxed bed, Hope had burst into tears before the señora was out of the room. All night Guy lay beside his drugged wife, listening. At about five, after an interval reminiscent of one of Marmaduke's naps, the weekend roistering in the bar, the counterpoints of jukebox and Impacto machine, exhaustedly gave way to the shrieking gossip of the yard – with a cluck-cluck here and a whoof-whoof there, here a cheep, there a moo, everywhere an oink-oink. Worst or nearest was a moronic bugler of a cock, playing tenor to the neighbours' alto, with his room-rattling reveille. 'Cock-a-doodle-do', Guy decided, was one of the world's great euphemisms. At seven, after an especially unbearable tenor solo (as